This Sunday’s Lectionary readings resemble last Sunday’s – feeding the people in the wilderness – but this week emphasizing what we might think an unimportant detail. The prophet Elisha and Jesus in the Gospel of John pay much attention to the leftovers from the meal: “And when they had had their fill, he said to the disciples, ‘Gather the fragments left over, so that nothing will be wasted.’ So they collected them and filled twelve wicker baskets with fragments from the five barley loaves that had been more than they could eat.” Why the attention to this detail?
I suggest it is to show the abundance of divine blessings. God not only gave food, but food in abundance, just as God gave Israel not just a land, but a land flowing with milk and honey. The Bible does not hold up poverty as an ideal, but rather abundance. God wants us to have enough, more than enough. The ideal of abundance is the reason why God in the Bible is so concerned with poor people and so quick to defend them. Why? Because salvation in the Bible is not something that happens in the next life. Rather, it begins now, not some future time; God’s salvation is earthy and concrete. It is most visible, therefore, where salvation, abundance, had previously been absent. The current in Catholic theology called Liberation Theology directs our attention to poor and marginal people. The reason is not that they are better than anyone else; they generally are no more virtuous than anyone else. The reason for God’s preferential option for the poor is because the abundance that God wants every human being to enjoy has not yet happened to them. Salvation in the sense of having enough food, shelter, and peace has not yet taken place for them.
In today’s Gospel, the people seem to see Jesus as a conventional messiah who will lead the people to a military victory over their enemies. The crowd’s wrong judgment warns us to see the sign, the multiplication of the loaves, as it really is—not a messianic stunt, but a new gathering of Israel that invites us to embrace the opportunity to conduct ourselves as God’s people.
Philip and Andrew, the two apostles named in the scene, can help us learn from the scene. Each responds differently to Jesus’s question differently, “Where can we buy enough food for them to eat?” Philip gives a practical and perhaps typical answer: “Two hundred days’ wages worth of food would not be enough for each of them to have a little.” In other words, “It’s impossible. Don’t even try.” But Andrew leaves the door open for Jesus to act, and provides us with a model: “There is a boy here who has five barley loaves and two fish; but what are these for so many?” A fact, yes, but an expectation too! Andrew has given us an answer that we can imitate.
